Current trends in radio base station development strive towards a modular design, e.g. the base station comprises a plurality of separate modules in which various functionalities are implemented. Consequently, upgrades and expansions of the system can be provided by simply inserting or replacing a module in the base station. However, for a number of specific functionalities this method of design results in an increased complexity and unnecessary signaling between the modules. One such functionality is so called Multi User Detection (MUD) taking the other users into consideration jointly. A base station with MUD is capable of receiving and detecting multiple users at the same time (serial or parallel). When this detection process is divided between several detection modules, problems arise. In order to be able to effectively implement interference mitigating functionalities such as so called Interference Cancellation (IC) between users in such systems, the various separate modules need to be able to take interference caused by signals originating from users assigned to other modules into consideration. Consequently, the modules need to exchange information about their respective user connections, which increases the complexity and the cost of implementation.
An informative article “Software Radio Architectures for Interference Cancellation in DS-CDMA Systems” (by I. Seskar, N. B. Mandayam, IEEE Personal Communications, August 1999) discloses a reconfigurable architecture for linear multiuser detection. The architecture enables a dynamic receiver which can be reconfigured into a plurality of different receiver structures, e.g. matched filter (MF), successive interference canceller (SIC), approximate decorrelator (AD), exact decorrelator (DC), and minimum squared error detector (MMSE).